


la petite mort

by saltydorkling



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Arc Reactor, Body Horror, Body Worship, Fear of Death, Hurt/Comfort, Loki is a GOD, M/M, Pain, Palladium Poisoning, Purple Prose, Succubi & Incubi, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Worship, and Tony is his devout follower, or he will be...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-09-23 05:53:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20335153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltydorkling/pseuds/saltydorkling
Summary: Tony knows that he's dying--he's known for a while. All he can do is find refuge in his sleep, basking in the presence of a beautiful dream that bathes in starlight and is taking from him more than he can give.





	1. the little death

**Author's Note:**

> if this sounds familiar -- it is! it was posted years and years ago and deleted when i nuked my ao3 account into orbit. but now it's back! yay! i'll be posting more of my older works in the following weeks :)
> 
> lo, beware of purple prose.

* * *

“It’s you again.”

Dagger sharp teeth gleam. “Aye.”

There is a long, sinuous line of muscle writhing under flickering pale skin. The man chuckles when Tony averts his eyes and swears under his breath. The shadows play over the white torso, light and dark blending to reveal brief flashes of tantalizing flesh, still bearing the marks from their last tryst.

“So coy!” The imp marvels, weaving dusk and dawn together with a opulent wave of his slender hand. “Lo, I yet still burn with your touch!”

Mouth watering, yet tongue dry, Tony reaches forward to graze the tip of a rough finger over a heavy bruise. The man shudders under his touch and parts his lips as a pink tongue darts out in a flash-burst of color in the night gathering around him.

“Why dost thou resist me, lover mine?”

“You talk stupid,” Tony mumbles—it is familiar, it is safe—a common argument that the minx always counters with—

“No more words,” and twines those misty-dim arms around his neck, molds his smooth chest to Tony’s, and kisses him soundly with a low growling moan.

As always, his dream tastes of moonlight and stardust, and Tony wants to struggle, wants to fight, but, like every night, he gives in with a sigh. His nails dig into the rounded globes of his lover’s ass and the man hisses with pleasure.

But Tony goes no farther, and the man pulls back with a scowl. Tony smirks. “Tell me your name first.”

Poisonous eyes narrow. “You cared not before. Do you plead for the names of your earthly slatterns? Do you sigh for them, as you do me?”

Tony can honestly say he has never had a jealous dream before—but no, he laughs and combs his fingers through the stygian hair. “Nah—but you gotta have a name.”

The man stills. Blinks. Breaths a faint ‘yesss’ and Tony grins and sets to work.

* * *

He wakes up with a groan. Instead of a beautiful man in his arms, there’s only the burn of palladium in his veins. Tony sleeps more now, the lassitude of death creeping on him, weighing down his shoulders, and twisting his back into the hunch of a man twice his age.

The extra sleep as an added benefit, if one would call anything to do with dying a benefit: he sees more of the man from his dreams.

_“My name is Loki,” _he had whispered with a sigh as Tony came, spilling deep into the man’s welcoming body, _“And you are mine.”_

Tony lurches forward and vomits. He does not quite make if off the bed, and his sheets soak up the purulent, bitter smell. It seeps into his mattress, it permeates the air, it clings to his skin—

Death’s bony fingers trace ice down his spine.

Every time he wakes, he feels weaker, older, like the only point of consciousness is to be reminded how sick he is. At least in his dreams, he is whole and healthy—there is no arc reactor glowing washed-out blue punched into his chest; there are no engorged veins spreading like poisonous snakes across his torso.

Tony thinks of Loki, of the man he has never seen fully, despite him being a figment of imagination. Loki is handsome, Loki is barely controlled fire, Loki is cool and sweet ice.

Loki.

At least his subconscious has good taste.

* * *

“Loki.”

There is a happy, breathy sigh and Loki forms in front of him, draped in moonlight with his shoulders coyly exposed to Tony’s hungry stare.

“I have missed you,” Loki murmurs and tilts his head. His inky hair sweeps against his collarbone; alabaster and night. “It has been…”

“A day, Loki.”

“That is hours too long.”

Tony inclines his head in agreement; his hands shake with the need to touch the slender man before him, but he is held back by invisible bindings.

Loki smiles. “You kept me waiting. I devised a means to keep you still and here and with me.” He slides down the moonlight cloak, flashing bits of bare skin for Tony’s approval. As always, darkness dances over Loki’s skin, obscuring him from true sight, but the bare glimpse of a Loki’s still-soft cock is enough to elicit a groan.

The show continues as Loki bathes himself in a swirling green nebula and braids his hair with meteors. He lotions his soft skin with the rays of a dwarf star, sighing with pleasure as it flares against him with the slight flickers of life yet remaining.

Tony is entranced. He tugs at his reigns, desperate for some contact with the man before him. The god, the angel, no—the devil, surely, for those impish eyes twinkle with mischief as Loki glances over Tony’s aching need.

He presses the star to Tony’s lips, and it explodes in a burst of taste and sound and color and Tony feels like he’s drowning, but the thought does not fill him with the fear it should—Loki climbs into his lap, leaving a glittering comet tail behind him, and that’s all Tony can focus on, the milky expanse of skin in front of him, the sweet-smelling hair tumbling over his face…

Loki leans them back, and Tony is trapped by the curtain of Loki’s dark mane, still weaved with quasars.

There is resonance as they come together, a gravity well pulling them into one. Loki sighs and smiles with supernovas in his mouth. “In your own time, my starshine. Give me your all.”

And Tony sets to work.

* * *

The transition from sleeping to waking is slower, this time. He is drawn thin, worn down, ground to dust.

Tony thinks of Loki, but he only feels weaker, like the very thought of such vibrancy sucks more life out of him—and Tony is fast running out.

He lays back on the pillows and tries not to scream. But he wants to—oh, he wants to—Tony wants to scream and scream until his throat is bloody and his lips are torn and he vomits up the palladium taint in his body, until he is fresh and whole and new.

Like he is with Loki.

Another drop of lifeblood trickles from his weary body.

_Loki, Loki…_

He closes his eyes, but does not dream.

When Tony rouses again, it is because of his phone blaring an incessant, tuneless ringtone that makes Tony’s head spin. He slams a hand on it.

“‘Lo?”

“Tony, are you drunk?” It is Pepper, or perhaps not—his ears are buzzing and he can only make out the soft inflection on a woman’s voice. “Tony?”

“I… I don’t…”

_Loki…_

Tony’s temples pound and he’s sure any moment his whole head will explode into a new galaxy; a big bang, a new start.

“Yton? Yton? Acn ouy hare me? Ammdit! Rae ouy dunrk?”

He shakes his head, trying to clear the static. “I can’t—”

“Ouy eend to ocme in to the ffocie. Here’st a borda eemtngi.”

_Loki, Loki…_

A wild spurt of laughter surges out up his raw throat and tumbles out of his tear ducts. His nose twitches as it hears the woman becoming more and more frustrated.

“Yton!”

“He’s draining me dry,” Tony advised her with thick ears. His nostrils purse. “I think he’s killing me and I can’t… I can’t…”

“Yton? Ouyr not mkanig any seens. Rae ouy ok?”

“I can’t stop thinking about him!”

There is an echo of Loki’s pretty laugh in his mind, and he vomits.

* * *

“You have returned to me,” Loki—god, what a name, what a perfect, knife-edged name—leans back, reclining on a swirling nova and smiles. “I had not dared to believe it would be so soon. I am… delighted.” His teeth gleam through the mire.

Stardust drifts to cloak Loki’s body from him, and Tony waves it away impatiently. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

Loki’s glowing eyes narrow.

And Tony smiles.

With a broad gesture, he banishes the fragile spell-weaves around Loki’s shifting form, leaving him pale-pink and naked. “See,” Tony’s smiled widens, madly, because he is dying, and this asshole has been—“I’ve looked into lucid dreaming… and I know what you are, Loki.”

Loki laughs, high and brittle. “Then tell the monster who he is! Burn my face with your light, child, that you may live a while longer in agony!”

The word falls from Tony’s lips like a drop of acid. “Incubus.”

There is a whirling as the ground shifts under his feet, the stars and cosmos replaced by dank and dirty stone—the laughing man thins; he shrivels until he is gaunt, yellow-skinned and chained.

“Close enough, my starshine.”

Blue spreads over Loki’s sore-ridden and fetid skin in a parody of the starlight that once covered him. The reactor sits heavily in Tony’s chest, and the rivers of palladium are once more etched into his chest like the swirling arms of the galaxy. Loki surveys him with a twisted and caustic smile. “I gave you such sweet pleasure, and you spit in my face. Boor.”

“Makes sense,” Tony shrugs as though he did not hear Loki, his own eyes taking in the kneeling and pestilent man before him. They are both dying, both withering away. “I always wondered why my own dream wouldn’t let me suck him.”

“As if you are worthy of my seed,” Loki spits and rattles his chains. He laughs once more.

“What you do, does it really kill people?”

“Nay, foolish mortal. Sex is but another form of worship. I cast myself to the cosmos in search of one who would raise me from this filth, who would offer me my due benediction… and I found you. But I am not the cause of your condition, no.”

“I already knew that,” Tony huffs. He paces the cell; it is so small that he barely takes two steps before turning again. The ceiling slats from the normal height where he shuffles, to a sharp incline that forces Loki to keep his neck and back bent. “But you are making it worse.”

Loki just smiles. “I desire to live as much as you, mortal. Though why the pique? You hasten your death well enough on your own. I merely offer to make your death meaningful.”

That smarts—or perhaps it is just the ache from the metal in his veins. “Well, I have a counter offer—a trade, of sorts.”

“Oh, so I love when mortals believe they can barter with a god.”

“I’ll bust you out.”

That catches Loki’s attention—he stills and casts a critical eye over Tony. Green flickers over his dying reactor, over the spider webbed palladium veins, over the diseased pallor of his once tan skin. “In return, my lovely dream?”

Tony motions to his chest. The bound man seems to ponder for a moment, weighing his options. He shifts on his knees, and Tony can see the white flash of bone and the dark black of rotted muscle.

“You free me from my prison,” Loki enunciates slowly, “And in return, I purge the venom from your veins.”

“Not good enough. Removing the palladium won’t do a damn thing if I have to put it back to keep the shrapnel under control. You take that out, too.”

Loki rattles his chains again, forehead creased in deep thought.

“Tick tock, Christmas Past. I think I’m waking up.” Tony’s grin is all teeth and canines and Loki snarls.

“Deal. Destroy the runes and my magic will be unfettered.” Loki closes his eyes, rapturous, seemingly savoring his next words: “I will be free.”

So Tony sets to work—only this time, his goal is not with muffled wails of his partner, nor the clenching heat engulfing him, nor the sweet press of skin to his own. He chips and pulls at the rusted, rune-lined cuffs. The physical chains do not break, but Tony can see some innate structure in them fade—the magic, and he would have scoffed at any other time. _Magic..._ but Tony has seem a magic of his own, hidden in atoms and electrons and the inner workings of the universe. Slowly, he wears away the forces holding Loki back.

The world rushes black, and an exuberant, wild, gleeful cackle swirls in the air before Tony wakes up to the flash of lightening and an earth-shaking bolt of thunder.

His chest is still weighed. His blood still poisoned.

Tony is still dying.

* * *


	2. crown of stars

* * *

Tony is standing on a bridge. It’s strange, glowing, suspended over open space—he can see the stars when he looks down.

Tony is standing on a bridge. It’s broken, desolate, ruined beyond all compare—there are gaping holes and it flickers briefly with dying light.

The bridges flickers back and forth, caught between two realities like an old VHS tape stuttering. At the end, there is a golden city. Towersrise, tall and proud, then collapsed and crumbling

He closes his eyes and exhales.

When Tony opens his eyes again, the images have settled. The bridge is destroyed and the city razed.

“It was once beautiful,” murmurs a voice next to him. Tony turns to see Loki staring at the city with a lost, mournful expression. He’s clothed, not in stellar wind and tektite, but in scaled armor, layer over layer weaving together in a fishbone pattern. Loki’s hair is still as dark as umbra as it spilled out from under a horned helmet; his skin still as pale as moonshine, but his eyes have stilled. They are no longer shifting nebula, imploding dwarf stars, the birthing of a fresh universe, but… green. Twinkling, downcast, and intoxicating, yes, but only green.

No longer an incubus—a warrior. Perhaps a king.

“You’ve changed,” Tony comments, shifting his gaze to the ruined city at the end of the bridge. He walks towards it, unafraid of the yawning gaps on the bridge.

This is his dream, and he won’t die yet.

“Asgard,” Loki falls into step next to him, swinging along as easily as if they have not spent months screaming into each others’ shoulders, grinding together in a worshiping dance, twining their fingers in a gentle embrace. “It was once my home—the City Eternal.”

“Doesn’t look like it, bud.”

“No. This is a fate not yet come to pass, but it will. The Unconquerable City will be conquered. The impregnable walls—”

“Pregnated? Who should I send the flowers to?” Tony flashes a smile, gleaming white and sharp.

Loki is unfazed. He waves a hand and the city—Asgard, he called it, the city of the gods?—rises proud and true once more. “I will not let this destruction come to pass. Foolish Asgard—yet I owe my brother—”

“You owe **me,** Loki.”

“I owe the dead nothing.”

“I’m not dead yet.”

Loki turns to face him, a thoughtful expression written on his face. “No… no, you are not.” He offers a tight-lipped smile as his eyes fall to Tony’s chest. “But you will be.”

“Yeah, and it’s kinda your job to fix it.” Tony is not angry—he’s just tired. Dying is so exhausted, who would have thought? In the waking world, his vision is starting to blur, his hearing is going, his hair is falling out by the fistful. Is he mad, to hold on to such a dream, to believe that a man he has never met will save him?

Yes.

And he’s accepted that—Tony Stark is dying.

Tony Stark is probably not going to wake up from this dream.

“Why should I?” Loki muses, “It is not as if you will throw me back in my cage.”

Tony says nothing. For once, he simply has nothing to say.

His chest hurts.

Loki shimmers and his armor melts away, replaced by the lunar glow of his star-weave cloak. His hair twinkles with a thousand, thousand pulsars once more. Loki smiles, and sunlight pours from his lips.

Tony sighs, awash in the Loki’s beautiful radiance. His illness has pervaded his very dreams, though, and he feels too weak to do more then bask in his celestial presence.

That, and walk this damnable bridge to the torn down city.

“I could sense your disapproval, starshine—you missed me as thus. The truth…” Loki laughs bitterly, and energy condenses to singular point. “‘The truth,’—straight from a liar’s mouth. Ha! The truth is, starshine, I have been seeking a cure. I have found one.”

“And?”

There is an explosion below them as the energy erupts. A new galaxy stretches out, molten hot and spreading like wildfire. Their steps do not falter.

“Loki has no part in this. All I can do is advise you.”

The pair are half-way across the bridge, and smoke wisps from Loki’s bared shoulders. He leans in and presses a kiss to Tony’s mouth, tracing the geometric palladium lines with his thumb. Loki’s lips brush the other man’s cheek until they reach his ear, and, with a breathy sigh that feels like jolts of electricity, he begins to whisper.

* * *

Tony wakes with a fresh burst of energy, life coursing through his veins and yes, god, yes! The palladium is still there, still toxic, but the pain’s receded, his mind is no longer stuck in a loop of constant pain—

He throws himself out of bed. How to celebrate? What to do?

Donuts.

Yes, this calls for donuts.

* * *

Almost a year later, and on a flickering screen, a man kneels, a scepter gripped tightly in his hand. He rises as though he has just been coronated, glancing to the golden badge of office with a manic grin.

“I am Loki, of Asgard—”

Tony stops the footage.

_“Will I see you again, Loki?”_

_“In time, yes—I will not be able to stay far from my most ardent worshiper. You will see… a part of me. A shell. You have freed my mind, but my body is still enslaved.”_

_“Good—‘cause you still have to take out the shrapnel, too.”_

He resumes.

“_—_and I am burdened with glorious purpose.”

“Yeah, gettin’ this damn crap outta my chest, bucko,” Tony mumbles, but smiles. He wonders for a moment if Loki's conscious is still falling through the cosmos, still twining starlight into his hair as his body is consumed with madness.

He has hours yet before dawn, before he must help SHIELD apprehend the man who saved his life, who prodded Tony into accepting their help in the first place. Who, even he had little to give, gave him just enough life to save his own.

On the T.V., Loki smiles. “You have heart.”

_“That is my trade,” Loki murmurs as he straddles Tony’s waist. The bridge glows under them in a kaleidoscope of colors and Loki throws his head back, tossing his hair so the glimmers set it aflame. “Free my body, and I will free your heart.”_

_Tony grips his hips, but his hands are shaking. He wants to thrust up to Loki, meet him, but even in a dream, his body is too weak—it is crisscrossed with palladium, and Loki laughs, an explosion of sound that heralds the forming of a new star._

He has hours yet. Tony turns off the T.V. and runs a hand through his hair.

_“There may come a battle—tell no one. My brother must not know. Fate is not a child's toy to be played with and discarded. And I—I must return to Asgard, no matter the cost.”_

So Tony sits in the darkness and waits for either his dreams or a fight.

* * *

First comes the fight_—_and the awful sensation of falling that is nothing like freedom and weightlessness the true Loki had given him.

Then comes the muzzle, the meeting in the park. Loki's eyes find his. Tony's literal starcrossed lover is battered and bruised, but his eyes, though haughty, are clear. He gives one scant shake of his head when Tony makes to step towards him.

And finally, more waiting. Tony has grown patient now; rushing Loki would not end well.

* * *

“Starshine!”

Tony’s eyes snap open to meet ones of churning nebula. “Loki—”

Loki just smiles. He sits upon a wing-backed throne, the starlight illuminating his pale body. He is regal, austere, and smiling like a moon-struck fool. “Hush, hush. I live. And lo!” Loki gestures to the golden spear in his hand, not so different from the staff now laying in Tony’s workshop, “Lo, I have my throne. My crown. My birthright.”

And Tony cannot deny Loki’s beauty—no, his body was sculpted by hand to be on a throne, surely, for the regality of it fits him like a glove. “And… the destruction of Asgard?”

“Averted, starshine. Now come to me—I wish to celebrate my victory.” Loki rises, and stardust scatters around his bare feet. He extends a hand towards Tony—the wrist is limp and demure, but Tony has a feeling that accepting that offering would change his life utterly, completely, without question—

“Feelin’ like a breeding stud here, Loki,” He deflects, but Loki is mesmerizing, the eddy created by the mixing azures and lilacs and glittering emeralds sucks his willpower away. Entire galaxies are birthed on Loki’s alabaster shoulders and there they burn out; whole lives are whiling away in the strands of his hair.

Tony swallows nervously.

Sweat is beading on his brow.

But Loki only stands as still as a statue for Tony’s rejection or acceptance.

_“Kinda thought you were mad at me,” Tony gasps as Loki pulls him to the strange, luminescent ground of the broken-fixed-broken bridge. “We didn’t end on the best foot earlier—”_

_“You took me back, starshine,” Loki murmurs and kisses his way down Tony’s torso, chasing the rivers of palladium with his tongue. “I would not be here had you not summoned me.”_

_He takes Tony’s cock in hand and pumps, though it is already solid and leaking. Loki’s satisfied groan tastes like ozone._

_“Accepted me.”_

_Plasma gathers in the black, gaping space under them and Loki plants his hands on Tony’s pectorals to steady himself. He lowers down and cries out when Tony breaches his rim, and Tony is lost, thrown into the star-filled nimbus that clings to him like a second skin._

_“Begged for me.”_

Tony takes Loki’s hand.

There is a burst of light and the most godawful sucking sensation, like he has been squeezed through a tube, put through a meat grinder, then mashed back together so haphazardly it is a miracle his head isn’t on his knees.

Tony opens his eyes—when did he close them?—and sees Loki, tall and glorious, in his armor once more. His helmet is back, and it casts a long shadow as Loki cocks his head.

“Welcome to Asgard, Tony Stark.”

And Tony’s not sure what to say or do—he stands in a glittering golden throne room in his tattered sleeping pants, in the presence of his dream (who is apparently a godking, no, he is Tony’s Star King, he is the ruler of Tony’s universe), and—

Loki presses a long finger to Tony’s lips. “Shh, shh, my devout worshiper, my starshine, my freedom and savior…”

He draws Tony in, settling him on the throne, and a glimmer of vanity shoots through him—yes, this is where he belongs; on a throne, serviced by a king—

Loki plucks at the fabric of his pants, and looks up at Tony through his eyelashes. “I told you that you were mine.” His clothes are shed in a flash of green and Tony’s pants are ripped to utter ruin. Loki laughs and sits astride him. “Now, please your king, and I will give you the universe.”

The universe? A good start. Oh, yes—Tony grins and sets to work.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> i do a tumbl under saltydorkling


End file.
